🚀 Twitter becomes X

Plus, why are users taking sleeping pills for Pokemon?

Justine & Olivia Moore

Jul 30

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✖️ Twitter rebrands to X. The app formerly known as Twitter has a new name! Owner Elon Musk rebranded the company to X (with a new logo and everything). The rebrand is part of Musk’s broader vision to build an “everything app,” similar to WeChat in China - where users can send payments, buy physical and digital goods, and book services as well as communicate with friends. Twitter’s legal name had already been changed from Twitter Inc. to X Corp back in March.

🌎 Worldcoin goes live. Sam Altman isn’t just the CEO of OpenAI - he’s also the co-founder of Worldcoin, a crypto protocol that gives users a verified digital identity to serve as “proof of personhood” in online posts and transactions. Worldcoin went live in a global, 35-city rollout this week, with users lining up for an iris scan that registers them in the system. The Worldcoin team says they onboarded 2M users in a beta phase, and plans to deploy 1,500 scanning orbs worldwide in the coming months.

📈 Meta reports earnings. Facebook’s parent company reported an 11% YoY increase in revenue, with earnings per share coming in above analyst estimates. This was largely due to a rebound in the ad market, as well as the company’s “year of efficiency” - Meta has 14% less employees now than at the same time last year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has the “most exciting roadmap I’ve seen in a while,” with products like Llama 2 (which we wrote about last week), Threads, IG Reels, the Oculus Quest 3, and other AI products in development.

🎨 SDXL goes live. Stability AI released a new text-to-image model, Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL). The company’s first model publicly launched in August 2022, and the new model provides more detailed and high-resolution images - as well as features like outpainting (extend an image), inpainting (add to an existing image), and transforming an image into another image using text prompts. You can try out the model on Clipdrop and DreamStudio.

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The newest craze in mobile games is actually…a sleep app. Last week, The Pokemon Company launched Pokemon Sleep, which has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue, per SensorTower. As of Saturday, the app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (The Pokemon Company’s home country), where it ranks #1 across the entire App Store!

How does it work? During onboarding, you tell the app what time you normally go to sleep, and it notifies you when it’s bedtime. You keep it open next to you as you sleep and it tracks your breathing patterns to detect whether you’re sleeping lightly (dozing), normally (snoozing), or heavily (slumbering). As you sleep, you find and “befriend” Pokemon with the same sleep patterns - which creates an element of surprise as you wake up to see which Pokemon you found. Users also earn berries to feed and level up these Pokemon.

Pokemon Sleep has another unique feature compared to sleep tracking apps - a friend graph! You can add up to 50 friends on the app to see their “research data” (the narrative of the game surrounds helping Professor Neroli with sleep research). You can toggle your privacy settings to decide what to allow your friends to see - sleep score, sleep type, time slept, etc. But, some users are posting their in-game QR codes publicly on Twitter or other platforms to allow anyone to add them.

From a usage perspective, it’s a little early to call where Pokemon Sleep will trend longer term. Often, when a massive company like Pokemon launches a new app, there is a big spike in downloads at launch that dies down very quickly if the app isn’t sticky (remember Threads?). In this case, the app has seen a slight drop-off over the past week, but looks to have stabilized in the 200k-300k new user per day range - and has even been climbing back up over the last few days.

SensorTower data estimates that almost 50% of new users are coming back on the second day - with a total base of 350k daily active users, which has been climbing every day this week. An early base of “addicted” power users seems to be emerging. So much so that several gaming publications have had to publish articles warning users not to take sleeping pills to unlock more or deeper sleep on the app! Some users are also paying for a PokemonGO+ device (which retails for $55 USD), which can be used to more accurately sleep track - and get a Pikachu companion in the app.

It’s too soon to tell how the app trends longer term - but it could follow the path of another Pokemon title, PokemonGO! After a massively viral start, 80% of the app’s users churned in the coming months. However, users who retained stayed for the very long term, and drove revenue far above the normal gaming app. In the gaming world, these users are called “whales” - app data platform Amplitude estimates they represent ~3% of gamers, but almost 70% of market revenue! Will Pokemon Sleep have the powerful game mechanics to retain the whales? Time will tell 🤔